An old picture: T helping with the car

Back in July I mentioned (link) T helping me replace a windshield wiper motor that I refused to pay a mechanic a ridiculous amount of money to do for us.  This was many years ago when we lived in New York.

I was going through some old computer files backing things up and happened across this picture.

I didn't even realize I had a picture of this.  It is amazing how much he has grown. 

Thanksgiving

Sorry for the gap but between work, more van break downs, and the new baby I haven't been able to keep up with the blog.

Let me start back up again by first talking about Thanksgiving this year.  V was busy with the babies and said she didn't want to fix a big dinner this year.  I told her not to worry about it and went to M to plan.  M was eager to be in charge so we made up a list of things to fix, prioritized it, and made a grocery list from that.

The day before we cleaned up the kitchen and set the turkey out to thaw.  Then Thanksgiving morning we were up before sunrise getting started.

Fixing cornbread for the stuffing. 

We set out the ingredients on the table to draw from while cooking.  (There is much more here than we used.  We buy the food in bulk at Costco where it is cheaper and store it until we use it again.)  

The prepared turkey ready to go in the oven. 

While the Turkey is cooking it is time to fix some deviled eggs. 

By then the rest of the family started waking up, so M showed the eggs to K.

We washed dishes as we went and once everything was cooking for a while there was time to mop the floor. 

Then it was time, after washing our hands, to mix up the stuffing. 

Finally the turkey was done!

And we set everything out on the table.

(We cheated with the pumpkin pie; I have made them from scratch before but we just bought one at the store to make things a bit easier.)

So we had turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, strawberry jello and canned peaches.  (We have a family tradition of pickled peaches for Thanksgiving, but canned peaches was the closest we could get this year.) 

Then everyone sat down to eat.

I was surprised at how good the turkey turned out.  We sort of made up an ad hoc recipe loosely based on other recipes.  At work earlier in the week I was talking to someone who came up with the idea for putting whole lemons inside the turkey.  I am writing down the recipe below so you can try it and so I don't forget.

11 lb turkey, thaw the day before.
Remove neck and giblets for gravy and stuffing.
Wash off the turkey and put it in a baking pan.
Preheat the oven to 350 F. 
Quarter a whole lemon and squeeze over the turkey then place pieces in the pan next to it. 
Put two whole lemons inside the turkey; they keep it moist while cooking and give a lemon flavor to the meat.
Chop up an onion, a potato, some celery, carrots, and oyster mushrooms and place them around the turkey.
Pour some chicken broth around the turkey.
Sprinkle some sea salt over the turkey. 
Sprinkle some spices, (savory, marjoram, thyme, sage, oregano, basil, rosemary) over the turkey.  (By the way, we have a rosemary plant growing outside and M picked fresh rosemary to use on the turkey.)
Cook for 1 hour at 350 F.  Then rub some butter and more spices over the turkey.
Cook for another hour at 350.  Rub some more butter and spices over the turkey.
Cook at 400 F for 30 minutes and it's ready to go.

The day after Thanksgiving we went back to the store and grabbed another turkey to put in the freezer because they were all on sale at a fraction of the cost.

Palestinian Statehood!

I heard the news on the radio today.  The UN general assembly voted to recognize Palestine as a non-member state.  138 countries voted in favor and 9 opposed.  It's about time! 

Gaza Conflict

Reuters has posted that Egypt may be able to mediate and immediate end to the Gaza bombing (link).  I hope so.  This is a humanitarian crisis.  From the linked article, "some 115 Palestinians have died in a week of fighting, the majority of them civilians, including 27 children, hospital officials said."  

Below is a graph I made of the deaths in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from 2000 to 2011 (data from here).  Many Palestinians are being killed, many of them children, in the conflict over the future of Israel and Palestine. 

Every single death on either side is a tragedy.  These are people, like you and I, with friends and families.  However, the relative numbers show that the way this is often presented in the Western media (Palestinian militants firing rockets onto Israeli civilians) is not the complete picture, and this, especially the last six years, does not help convince us that Israel is practicing a great deal of humanitarian restraint. 

Modern Hobo Sign Code

I stumbled across a modern QR-code version of the classic North American hobo sign code (wikipedia).

Above are just some examples of the signs from here (http://www.worldpath.net/~minstrel/hobosign.htm). 

This "Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.)" site has designed QR versions of hobo-like codes. Here are some examples.

It seems that the warchalk symbols (which are like the hobo codes and used to communicate wireless wifi access) are being incorporated into the hobo QR codes, as in the "free wifi" code above. 

In the process I also found out about temporary, washable chalk spray as a non-permanent option for placing the QR codes from templates.

These codes might be modified with symbols in the middle to make both a human readable and scanable version like the hackaday.com logo above (here is a link to that article).  

Another thought, QR codes seem perfect for the small black and white mosaic tiles, like the ones on bathroom floors.  Secret messages could be worked into the tile pattern. 

40 years

No, this blog is not 40 years old.  However, next month, December 2012, is an important anniversary for humankind on this planet. 

December 1972 was the last time humans traveled to the moon.  Since then we have been limited to the Earth's surface or to low Earth orbit.  When are we going back? 

The baby is here!

K was born.  A little 9 pound boy! 

Election Day

Here the local candidates stand on the sides of the roads and wave to people as you drive by.  Above is Kymberly Pine (far left) who is running against Tom Berg for the Honolulu City Council.  They have been out on the roadsides for the last month.  Below is Sharon Har (far right) running for a State Representative seat.  In case anyone is interested the full list is here (link). 

I've been waving to the candidates as I go by but I can't vote in most of their districts.  I don't remember this kind of in-person roadside advertising anywhere else I've lived.  We've also received a lot of advertising in the mail but this is the first place where I've seen family history (when the great grandparents first moved to Hawai'i and where) for both the candidate and their spouse(!) listed foremost.  (Hawaiians are obsessed with who has been in the islands for longest to rank people.)  Other points that are also popular are military support and jobs for local people.  Also a couple candidates have made stopping the rail project their central issues.

I took the older kids and went to vote earlier today (after most people have already voted on the mainland because of the time difference).  Sure enough, I was registered and it went off without a hitch.  I took my cheat sheet of candidates names that I had settled on after looking up what their positions were and the ballot initiatives and filled out the ballot from that.  I was even asked to fill out a survey in an exit poll but they didn't have a check box to blame Bush for the economy. 

Afterward I took the kids by the grocery store.  Election day in Hawai'i is a state holiday and there is no public school.  There were adults and children lined up with placards at the intersection where the candidates had been with "honk to support education" on the signs.  I had not heard anyone honk--and it was a busy intersection.  I beeped three times going through and they put up a cheer!  It helped underscore how education had fell by the wayside in the candidates debates; where is the education candidate? 

Carving Pumpkins

Every year we have some fun carving faces on pumpkins and putting candles in them for Halloween.  I meant to also get a picture of the faces lit up but in a few days they slumped and molded--one of the hazards of fall in the tropics.

Tsunami Warning

8pm. The alarms just went off.  High pitched; after dark here. This is our first tsunami warning since we arrived here in Hawai'i. I checked quickly online and there was a 7.7 magnitude quake off the coast of British Columbia and buoys indicated a tsunami for Hawai'i (link). 

We are on high ground so there is no immediate threat for us.

Then our internet connection quickly slowed to a standstill and we couldn't connect to other news pages (it took me several tries to save this blog post; I kept getting connection problems and ended up saving most of it as a local text file to finish posting later.)  I turned on a radio and picked up some communication on the ham radio 2 meter band (146.885 MHz) stating a 7.7 quake centered on Queen Charlotte Island (8:05pm), with a wave expected at 10:28 pm.  Some people are reporting in that the alarm has not gone off in parts of the island.  An emergency network is supposed to take over the frequency in 15-20 minutes. 

8:11 pm the alarm went off again.

At 8:30 people checked in for the emergency tsunami ham radio network.  There was some communication about evacuating an area in Kailua; telling people to go to a district park or to a church that are both designated tsunami refuges.  The alarm went off a few more times.  

I like having a ham radio as a backup.  I used it when the power went out to see what people in the area were talking about regarding the power outage.  I have it charged from our off-the-grid solar panel/car battery system so we could be completely without power for weeks and it would still work fine. 

Update:  The wave arrived on time but was smaller than expected.  This report puts it at a 2 1/2 foot swell. 

A Sea Hare!

In the pictures above and below you can see the latest addition to our aquarium.  M spotted this guy crawling around through our fake plant decorations.  He must have come in as a larvae in the fresh sea water we added to the tank.  I suspect this is a sea hare (Stylocheilus striatus) although it doesn't seem to exactly fit some of the descriptions I've found online.  The have big round "bodies" and two "ears" (tentacles) sticking up in front to resemble a hare sitting.  They do have a larval stage when they float around as microscopic plankton; I am just amazed that he grew so quickly and that we didn't notice him until recently.  I apologize for the picture quality; I am having a hard time focusing the lens through the side of the tank. 

Linear Filter and the Stock Market

A few blog posts ago I talked about a linear filter to separate a complex signal into individual components.  Really all this is doing is estimating weights (prices) by multiplying the individual components (number of items) by their weights and evaluating if this predicts the actual total signal (total price).  These weights are adjusted up or down to improve the accuracy.  The actual procedure is given by this equation:

where w' is the updated weight in the next learning cycle and r, the learning rate, is a small number to prevent over corrections.

In addition to estimating the individual weights/prices what is happening is the filter is getting better and better at estimating the total signal/cost.  Here is a plot over the 200 days of learning. 

The guess price (total cents) quickly zeros in close to the actual price with the absolute error dropping and then fine tuning the remaining small errors. 

I was curious how this might work with an actual example.  So I downloaded historical closing prices, over the last year, of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  Below is a plot of the prices (dollars per share) on a log scale over the last year. 

I set up the filter to use the closing prices the previous day of all 30 companies to predict the closing price the next day of 3M, as an example company.  In the plot below you can see that it quickly zeroed in to track/predict 3M share prices.

And, below is a plot of the learned weights for each company.

There are a few things I would like to point out about this.  First of all, once the prediction zeros in, the weights don't change much at all for the rest of the learning period.  The highest positive weight in predicting 3M the next day is not 3M; it is BAC, Bank of America.  IBM actually has a small negative weight, suggesting that the previous closing price of IBM should be subtracted, in a small amount, to generate the predicted price of 3M the next day.

All in all this generates a nice correlation, after the first 20 days of initial learning, between predicted (y-axis) and actual (x-axis) closing prices of 3M on the following day.

However, as usual there is more to this story, which I will follow up on in a later blog post. 

Economic Politics by NPR, Economists and Spin Consultants

Link to full story.  

Planet next door

Our neighbor, Alpha Centauri B--a little over four light years away, has a rocky earth sized planet!  (link)  It is too close to the star to be earth-like in temperature but there may well be other planets orbiting.  Let's put together an unmanned mission to go take a look around (link)! 

Spotted Periwinkle, Littoraria pintado

On the rocks just above the water at the beach are lots of spotted periwinkles (Littoraria pintado).  A lot of these have snails in them but they are also favorite shells for hermit crabs.  We grabbed a few from next to a tide pool and dropped them in our aquarium.  The first thing they do is crawl up out of the water and wait, without moving, for days.  After a while, occasionally, they will appear in a different position a few days later.  At this point I'm guessing they crawl around under the water at night. Their cousins, the common periwinkle (Littorina littorea) of Europe, are edible.  

Coconut Experiment

Over a year ago I told the kids that I had a seed for each one of them to plant when they arrived in Hawai'i.  I surprised them with coconuts--giant seeds.  F's probably weighed as much as she did.  We tried planting them halfway buried in soil.  (In the picture above they have dried out in the last month and the soil has pulled away.)  I read that it can take six months for a sprout to appear, so we watered them for a year.  However, they did not germinate so I am calling this one quits.  It might be for the best.  I am not sure what we would do with them if they did sprout.  Our landlord has told us not to plant them on the property we are renting. 

Persons Family: Dr. John Reed Persons

The next child of Rev. Elbert E. Persons is Dr. John Reed Persons.  He was born April 15, 1876 in Norwalk, Huron Co., Ohio and died August 23, 1924 in Seattle, Washington.

Dr. J. R. Persons went to Northwestern University Medical School and to Chicago Medical College.  He practiced medicine in Oak Harbor, Kirkland, and Seattle, Washington. 

In 1900 J. R. Persons was living in Chicago, Illinois.  

June 30, 1909 John R. Persons married Imo A. Monroe (born 1877 Ames, Iowa; died 1960 Los Angeles, California). 

On September 12, 1918 he filled out a WWI draft registration card which gave his build as short and slender with gray eyes and gray hair.

And that's all, I have not found any record of a child of J. R. Persons or any records beyond this. 

Linear Filter

I've been reading about linear filters that separate complex signals into contributions from individual components.  They work in a very simple manner and it seems a bit odd that they are effective at all, but they do work.

Here is an example.  Suppose you observe meals being sold at a cafeteria.  At the end of each day you have how many of each food item were sold (pizza slices, bottled water, salads, and fortune cookies) and the total amount in cash collected at the cash register.  However, when you return from your data collection you realize you forgot to write down how much each item costs.  So here is a plot of the data.

So, for example, on day 25 a total of $85.76 was made and 9 slices of pizza, 5 bottles of water, 5 salads and 6 cookies were sold.  So how much did each cost?  (The individual signals between 1 and 10 in the plot are contributing in different proportions to the combined signal.)  By using a simple procedure of first guessing prices of 100 cents for each item, then updating that guess by raising or lowering the price if the total is too high or too low, for each day, we can work out the individual prices.  The key is to change the price of items that are common on a particular day by (relative to its current price estimate) a bit more  than items that are rarer--because they contributed more  to the price.  Doing this over a 200 day period gives the following plot. 

The y-axis here is in pennies.  You can see that the price estimates approach and stabilize around certain values over time.  In fact, the prices I used in this test example are $5.74 for pizza, $4.63 for salad, $1.89 for water and $0.25 for cookies, which are almost exactly the prices arrived at (within a few pennies) by the linear filtering procedure. 

In other words the relative contributions of the individual components (individual prices), to the overall signal (total price) have been estimated with reasonable accuracy--pizza has a larger effect on the total signal than cookies do, etc.

 In a simple case like this we could work out the individual prices by hand and sifting through the data (e.g. by finding examples where only one component changed).  However, this can be computer automated and works for more complex datasets and even in cases where items are correlated (if you tended to sell more botteled water with salads or cookies with pizza). 

Kung-Fu: Yellow Sash!

T tested today at his Kung-Fu school and passed up to the next level.  The picture above from earlier is the last time you will see him in his white sash.  Now he will wear a yellow sash. 

His Sifu took him aside today and told him that he hoped he would continue with Kung-Fu because not many non-Chinese kids are interested in Kung-Fu (in fact it used to only be taught to people with Chinese ancestry until recently, beginning here in Hawai'i) and that T had improved a lot since he started in March and he wanted to see him continue. 

Persons Family: Frank and Alfred

Frank Persons (June 9, 1871 - October 12, 1871) and Alfred Cookman Persons (January 16, 1873 - August 23, 1881) are the next two children of Rev. Elbert Elvero Persons in Ohio.  However, according to my notes, they both died young so I can not find living relatives by following them further.  I am just including them here for completeness. 

Noisy Attraction in Two Dimensions

And this is the opposite of the last post.  The points attract each other locally.  However, to make it more interesting the noise (wiggle) increases with the number of local points, so if clumps accumulate too large they can fly back apart.


And here is a version where the history of the points position is painted.

Repulsion in two dimensions

Here is another small basic program I made.  The points repeal each other and move from random starting points to a regular "crystal" structure.


Below is a version that paints the background. 

Persons Family: Mary Persons

The daughter of Dr. Elbert Lapsley Persons and Helen Coles Persons was Mary Persons, born ca. 1937 in North Carolina.

At this point I have very little that I have been able to track down for Mary Persons other than appearing with her parents in the 1940 census. 

This is purely circumstantial, but it is possible that she is the same person as Mary Chauncey Persons that attended Duke University in the 1950's.  Mary lived in Durham and her father was a professor at Duke and she would be about the right age.  Below is a picture of M. C. Persons from the 1958 university yearbook. 

Persons Family: Dr. Elbert L. Persons

Moving down another generation in my search for what happened to this part of the family, the son of Dr. Elbert E. Persons is Dr. Elbert Lapsley Persons; my father's second cousin.  He was born September 23, 1904 in Fort Flagler, Washington.

He lived with his parents in New York and Ohio in 1910 and 1920.  In 1930 he is living in Boston, Massachusetts and from 1940 onward his residence is Durham, NC, where he died Nov. 24, 1970.  

In Durham he was a professor at Duke University Medical School.  He was also president of the American Society of Internal Medicine and the American Therapeutic Society. 

Here is a transcript of his obituary:

"Duke Medical Professor Dies
DURHAM (AP) - Dr. Elbert Lapsely Persons, 66, former president of the American Society of Internal Medicine and of the American Therapeutic Society, died Tuesday after a sudden illness.
He was a professor at the Duke University Medical School, with which he was connected for 40 years, and maintained a private practice.
During World War II, Persons was a director of as Duke-affiliated medical unit which served at Ft. Bragg, N.C., and in England.
From 1950 to 1959 he was governor of the Carolina chapter of the American College of Physicians.
A memorial service will be held Friday at the Duke University Chapel. "
(The Danville Bee, Nov. 25, 1970, P. 32, (7C))

From this we can see that Dr. Persons was involved in WWII with a medical unit.

Dr. Persons married Helen Coles (born ca. 1905 New Jersey); a sister of the blind painter Mary Drake Coles (link); before she lost her vision M. D. Coles worked in Haiti for a while.  They had a daughter, Mary Persons, born about 1937 in North Carolina. 

Cleaning the Old Vacuum Pump § 2

Next came cleaning up the pump itself.  I drained the old oil out, which was black.  The took it apart. 

I got the rotor housing out.  The case around it was full of brown sludge from dust and rust mixed in the old oil.  So I cleaned that out and scrubbed everything. 

Above you can see one of the actual rotors (it is a two-stage pump). 

I put it all back together and need to get some more oil to add, then fire it up and see if it works. 

DNA Extraction

In another project, we tried extracting DNA from strawberries using household materials.  We had to work quickly because the strawberries were fast disappearing!

First we blended the strawberries in a blender.

Then we added some dishwashing soap to disrupt the cell membranes. 

Then some meat tenderizer to break down the proteins.  In the picture below I was describing the cell membranes, the proteins that chop up DNA, and proteins that are attached to the DNA, on the whiteboard to explain to T and M why we were doing this. 

Then we poured the slurry through a strainer.  

Then we mixed rubbing (isopropyl) alcohol in the solution and white clumps of DNA appeared as it came out of solution between the alcohol and the water layer. 

We tried spooling the DNA out but it was a gross mess. 

In retrospect I think I shouldn't have used the blender on the strawberries.  It probably sheared the DNA molecules too much so they wouldn't string together well--we should have been gentler.  A single DNA molecule can be over an inch long!  The average spacing between "letters" in a strand of DNA is 3.4 ångstrom, which is 10^(-10) meter.  There are 6.6 billion of these ATCG basepair letters in the human genome, which works out to a combined length of 2.2 meters of DNA per cell (how does it all fit?).  Dividing this by 46 chromosomes gives an average of 1.9 inches (4.8 cm) per single DNA molecule. 

An even more amazing number comes from considering how much DNA is packed into your body.  Humans are made up of 10 trillion cells.  Which works out to a total of 22 billion kilometers of DNA per person if it was stretched out end to end.  This is more than twice the diameter of the orbit of Neptune around the sun! 

To carry this a step further, there are 7 billion humans on the planet right now.  The combined existing human DNA is a length of 1.54 x 10^(20) kilometers, or 154 quintillion kilometers, or 100 million light years (if my math is not off--a light year is about a trillion kilometers).  This is about twice the distance to the Virgo Galaxy Cluster!